He also likes talking to the people he likes to read. The president is a voracious consumer of opinion journalism. Most nights, before going to bed, he’ll surf the Internet, reading the columnists whose opinions he values. One of the great privileges of the presidency is that, when so inclined, he can invite these columnists to his home for meetings that can last as long as two-and-a-half hours.

“It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings. “He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he wants to win columnists over,” said another.

The president appreciates the back-and-forth exchanges at the sessions, past participants told POLITICO. He even occasionally asks aides or administration officials what a specific columnist thinks about an issue. Sometimes, the aide will then reach out to the columnist to ask his or her opinion, which has had the unintended effect of spurring the columnist to write a piece expressing his thoughts on that very issue.

“It’s like, ‘The president wants to know what you think about ‘x.’ So you go, ‘I guess I better figure out what I think about ‘x,’” one columnist explained.

The off-the-record meetings are held over coffee around the long wooden conference table in the Roosevelt Room, just off the West Wing lobby. Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there are regulars. Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’ Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential representatives from the right.

The sessions, which have become more frequent in Obama’s second term — he held at least three in October — provide a stark contrast to the combative, sometimes cantankerous relationship between the White House and the press corps. They also serve as an alternate means of shaping the debate in Washington: a private back-channel of genuine sentiment that seeps into the echo-chamber, while Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, delivers largely scripted responses in the public briefings. Obama holds the occasional off-the-record meeting with top White House correspondents, but they are few and far between — a fact that rankles some members of the press corps. (POLITICO has attended off-the-record sessions with the president.)

At the same time, these bull sessions give validation to an oft-heard critique: that Obama prefers the law school salon to the bully pulpit — that he would rather be regarded as smart by the people he regards as smart than be feared by the opposition or seen as effective by the people he governs.

The presidency is a job preeminently of public communication and persuasion, and yet Obama’s public campaigns have often failed to achieve tangible results. His signature healthcare law is struggling. He hasn’t moved the needle on gun control or the sequester by going public. Syria was a muddle of mixed messages and wild improvisation. On such issues, private meetings with his intellectual peers hardly seem effective, let alone an adequate substitute for more on-the-record press conferences.

The goal in these get-togethers, participants said, is two-fold: First, the president wants to convince the columnists that he’s right — about the debt ceiling, about health care, about Syria — and that his opponents are wrong.

“The president is thoroughly convinced that the course he has set out is correct, and that his opponents are either wrong-headed or crazy or, in the case of [House Speaker John] Boehner, insufficiently courageous,” said a journalist who has attended off-the-record meetings. “By getting together a group of intelligent people who are going to be writing about him or talking about him, he thinks he can show them how obviously everything he is doing makes sense.”

The second goal is more tactical: By meeting privately with the people who shape national opinion, the president ensures that his points of view will be represented in the media — even if those points of view aren’t directly attributable to him.

“He sees columnists as portals,” another journalist who has attended meetings said. “It works — I feel it work with me. It’s almost impossible to spend hours face-to-face with the president, unfiltered, then write a column or go on television without taking his point of view into account.”

For that reason, calling these sessions “off the record meetings” is actually inaccurate, said Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary for President George W. Bush, who held similar meetings.

“It’s a misnomer. After these meetings journalists will go on the air and say, ‘Here’s what the White House is thinking on this,’” Fleischer explained. “It’s smart. Every White House should do it.”

The line from the president’s off-the-record remarks to a pundit’s authoritative, on-air commentary can often be charted. New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait attended one off-the-record meeting on Oct. 17. The next day, he appeared on CNN and said that the president had “a lot of administrative action [planned] on the environment.”

“He didn’t mention that yesterday,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said, referring to public remarks the president had made hours before the off-the-record meeting. “He mentioned the budget, the immigration, the farm bill — I didn’t hear anything about the environment.”

“Yesterday is what he wants congress to do,” Chait said, referring to the president’s public remarks. Then: “He can do the environment without congress. That’s the real attraction… I think that’s the big move of his second term.” Of immigration reform, Chait said the president “probably” couldn’t get it passed, “but he’s going to try.”

Reading columnists or watching them on cable news after they’ve attended an off-the-record session at the White House thus becomes a form of tasseography. If you want to know where the president stands on a foreign policy issue, it is often said among Washington’s national security experts, read the latest column by David Ignatius.

“The facts are off-the-record, but the sentiment is not,” Chuck Todd, the NBC News political director and chief White House correspondent, said of the meetings. “When you know how the president thinks about something, when you understand his point of view, how do you avoid talking about it?” Todd said. “It’s in your head.”

Said a columnist who has attended multiple meetings, “When you can write your column with absolute surety, knowing that what you’re saying is a true reflection of what the President of the United States is thinking, how do you not do that?”